Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The news that the U.S. Air Force, joined at long last by some of the Arab nations most threatened by the Islamic State (ISIS), began bombing their headquarters and military sites in Syria was long overdue, but welcome. It took time because Obama had originally dismissed ISIS as a threat.

It no doubt took time to get Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia to team with the U.S., but missing from the action is Turkey that borders Syria and Egypt. Turkey has become increasingly Islamist, but appears determined to stay out of the war with ISIS. By initially refusing to provide arms to Egypt, Obama drove it into the waiting arms of the Soviet Union, but has since reversed its policy and is seeking to woe Egypt back as an ally.

In a September 23rd column, Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal opined that “…every President gets things wrong. Mr. Obama is not exceptional in those respects. Where he stands apart is in his combination of ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance. What does the President know? The simple answer, and maybe the truest, is: not a lot.”

Obama’s combination of ideology and ignorance is analyzed in an extraordinary book by Douglas E. Schoen and Melik Kaylan, “The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership.” It provides a fact-filled look at his failure to provide leadership to a nation that other nations have looked to for leadership and protection since the end of World War II.

Indeed, in addition to the ISIS videos of Americans and others being beheaded, it has taken the outspoken criticism of retired U.S. generals to mobilize public opinion to support a return to the battlefield. It is a battlefield that Obama has fled at every opportunity, pulling out all of our troops from Iraq and planning to do the same in Afghanistan.

I know that headline sounds completely outrageous. But it is actually true. The U.S. government is borrowing about 8 trillion dollars a year, and you are about to see the hard numbers that prove this. When discussing the national debt, most people tend to only focus on the amount that it increases each 12 months. And as I wrote about recently, the U.S. national debt has increased by more than a trillion dollars in fiscal year 2014. But that does not count the huge amounts of U.S. Treasury securities that the federal government must redeem each year. When these debt instruments hit their maturity date, the U.S. government must pay them off. This is done by borrowing more money to pay off the previous debts. In fiscal year 2013, redemptions of U.S. Treasury securities totaled $7,546,726,000,000 and new debt totaling $8,323,949,000,000 was issued. The final numbers for fiscal year 2014 are likely to be significantly higher than that.

So why does so much government debt come due each year?

Well, in recent years government officials figured out that they could save a lot of money on interest payments by borrowing over shorter time frames. For example, it costs the government far more to borrow money for 10 years than it does for 1 year. So a strategy was hatched to borrow money for very short periods of time and to keep "rolling it over" again and again and again.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose not to let President Obama's bold allegation that Israelis were not interested in peace go unanswered in his speech Monday at the UN. "Brazen lies spoken from this very podium against my country" is how Netanyahu described the remarks of previous speakers, when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly.

Just five days earlier, President Obama had made a shocking assertion in his role as president while speaking on the world stage. He claimed that there were "too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace." Obama scolded: "that's something worthy of reflection within Israel."

Not only did President Obama not include Palestinians in this demeaning and defamatory slur, he proceeded to equate "rockets fired at innocent Israelis" with "Palestinian children taken from us in Gaza." Not "taken from us" by Hamas who used them as human fodder in their attempted annihilation of Israel. But apparently "taken from us" by those Israelis not interested in peace.

No Israeli Prime Minister could allow such an attack to go unanswered. And so Netanyahu began his remarks by daring President Obama to distinguish between his battle against ISIS and Israel's battle with Hamas.

QOTD: "President Barack Obama's intelligence briefings have provided him with specific information since before he won re-election in 2012 about the growing threat of the terror group now known alternatively as ISIS and ISIL, an administration insider told MailOnline on Monday.

'Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president's daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election,' said a national security staffer in the Obama administration who is familiar with the content of intelligence briefings.

...But 'it's true,' he said, 'that the [intelligence] community was sending pretty specific intel up to us ... We were seeing specific threat assessments and many of them have panned out exactly as we were told they would.'" --David Martosko

These rules are generally used more directly by those at the leadership, key players, or planning level of the criminal conspiracy or conspiracy to cover up.

1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don't discuss it -- especially if you are a public figure, news anchor, etc. If it's not reported, it didn't happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.

2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.

3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method which works especially well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such 'arguable rumors'. If you can associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a 'wild rumor' from a 'bunch of kids on the Internet' which can have no basis in fact.

4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.

War On Terror: The Islamic State's call for "lone wolf" attacks on Western infidels might have met its match in the Second Amendment, as an armed man saves lives by shooting a jihadist wannabe bent on heeding that call.

Vaughan Foods employee Traci Johnson is alive today because the business she works for is not a gun-free zone at a time when the Islamic State is encouraging attacks on infidels in the West like the one in Moore, Okla., where co-worker Colleen Hufford was stabbed and beheaded.

The alleged attacker, 30-year-old Alton Nolen, was stopped as he was stabbing and preparing to behead Johnson by Mark Vaughan, the food distributor's chief operating officer. Vaughn, who is also a reserve county deputy, drew the gun he was carrying and stopped Nolen, police say, before he could claim more victims.

"This was not going to stop if he (Vaughan) did not stop it," Moore Police Sgt. Jeremy Lewis told the media.

Some will claim this is more "workplace violence" — a phrase used by the Obama administration to describe the carnage left by Maj. Nidal Hassan at Ft. Hood — the work of a disgruntled ex-employee with no significance beyond that.

But the similarities are eerie and may indicate the shape of a new threat we face.

QOTD: "The president has been telling us for years that he handled al-Qaeda by killing bin Laden. He has been telling us for weeks that the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda renegade that will soon reconcile with the mother ship for the greater good of unity in the anti-American jihad — is a regional nuisance that posed no threat to the United States. In recent days, however, reality intruded on this fiction. Suddenly, tens of thousands of terrorists, armed to the teeth, were demolishing American-trained armies, beheading American journalists, and threatening American targets.

Obama is not the manner of man who can say, “I was wrong: It turns out that al-Qaeda is actually on the rise, its Islamic State faction is overwhelming the region, and American interests — perhaps even American territory — are profoundly threatened.” So instead . . . you got “the Khorosan Group.”" --Andrew C. McCarthy

Sunday, September 28, 2014

President Obama's approval ratings keep dropping, no reliable poll shows battleground Senate Democrats with over 50% support, and GOP voters are excited to cast their ballots in 37 days. The midterm environment is toxic for Democrats, yet there's a chance Republicans may not take the Senate. Why?

Could it be that you and the rest of the Republican ruling class are completely out of touch with the grass roots? That you went to war with your own base? That you decimated any unity between the conservative and establishment wings of the party? And for what: to keep your incumbent protection racket going for mouth-breathers like Thad Cochran and Pat Roberts?

The Democrats have a huge money advantage. Last month alone, Democrats outraised Republicans by $1.6 million dollars.

Gee, I wonder why.

Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.

They intend to outspend Republicans between Labor Day and Election Day, having bought $109 MILLION in television ads already, compared to $85 million for GOP candidates and their allies so far. Democrats, Harry Reid's PAC, and liberal interest groups are launching hundreds of attack ads in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, and North Carolina - key states in the fight for the Senate.

It's a word you don't hear too often around Arizona: plague. But some fleas in northern Arizona have tested positive for plague and that has people on high alert.

Plague can be deadly to people and animals, but if found early on, it's very treatable with antibiotics. That being said, residents of Coconino County should be looking out for fleas... Fleas with plague were discovered in prairie dog burrows northeast of Flagstaff in the Doney Park area.

Five babies have tested positive for tuberculosis infection in El Paso after being at a hospital where hundreds of newborns may have been exposed to TB by a diseased worker at the facility, health officials said on Saturday.

The El Paso Department of Public Health also increased the number of people who may have been exposed to 858. It had said earlier this month that 706 babies and 43 employees were possibly exposed to the infected worker between September 2013 and August 2014.

And, by all means, let's not inquire into the immigration status of the "infected worker", because that would be profiling and nativist. Right, Jeb Bush?

Attorney General Eric Holder, the first attorney general in history to be held in contempt by the House of Representatives, surprised the political world today when he announced he would be resigning, effective on the confirmation of his successor.

Holder will leave a troubled legacy and many unanswered questions as John Fund and I discovered when we were researching our new book, “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.” The Justice Department veterans we talked to said that Holder has politicized the Department to an unprecedented degree, which should concern everyone who cares about the rule of law.

So what are the top seven worst actions by Eric Holder?

1. Operation Fast and Furious, probably the most reckless law enforcement operation ever carried out by the Justice Department. This gun-running scandal led directly to the death of an American border agent and many Mexican citizens. Holder was held in contempt because of his refusal to turn over information and documentation about this operation gone wrong that he basically claimed he knew nothing about.

2. Holder has waged a war on election integrity and “racialized and radicalized the [Civil Rights] Division to the point of corruption” according to one current Justice employee, embedding “politically leftist extremists in the career ranks who have an agenda that does not comport with equal protection or the rule of law; who believe that the ends justify the means; and who behave unprofessionally and unethically.”

3. Failure to conduct a real, criminal investigation of the IRS targeting of conservative organizations and to enforce the contempt citation issued by the House of Representative against Lois Lerner.

QOTD: "...Common Core teaches about a third of algebra 1 in pre-algebra, a third of pre-calculus in algebra 2, et cetera. Common Core teaches unnecessary abstractions as essential principles. Common Core creates calculator cripples. Common Core fails to derive mathematical expressions, instead presenting them as Holy Writ.

I predict that if we continue implementing Common Core, average students will drop out of math as early as they are allowed. Even math-bright students will hate math. Tutoring companies will proliferate to serve wealthy families. The educational gap between rich and poor will widen. If we want to destroy math and science education in this country, keep Common Core." --Cynthia Walker

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Hard-charging radio commentator Mark Levin is sick of waiting for the Republican Party to nominate a conservative for president, and today, he outlined his plan to accomplish just that.

Speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, the talk radio giant and bestselling author issued a call to action to the crowd of social conservatives, prescribing a grassroots movement to elect a conservative to the White House in 2016.

Levin lamented that Americans under age of 50 haven’t yet had the chance to vote for a true conservative such as Ronald Reagan for president and called on conference attendees to spend the next six months laying the groundwork for the 2016 election.

Given the disastrous reign of Eric Holder at the Department of Obstructing Justice -- "the most partisan Attorney General in history" according to Sen. Ted Cruz -- it's worth remembering the Republican nitwits, sycophants and dupes who voted to confirm him.

Government debt continues to amass at a dizzying pace. The federal government has displayed no discipline in reining it in and reestablishing a more sound fiscal footing for the future of the country. Our founding fathers, however, had the prescience to include in our Constitution the means whereby the states, and the people, could force the government to do what they have no appetite to do, to require a balanced budget.

Just since 2006, federal government debt has shot from $6.7 trillion, to nearly $18 trillion. The largest segment of that spending occurred over the past six years with five years of deficits exceeding $1 trillion. Our government has been spending 60% more than it’s been collecting in tax receipts.

Those figures do not even begin to address our long-term debt due to non-discretionary entitlement programs. According to the General Accounting Office’s (GAO) 2013 annual report, unfunded debt including Social Security and Medicare is over $76 trillion, an increase of 8% over 2012 levels. Our national debt increases by an estimated $8.2 million per minute, and about $350 billion per month.

QOTD: "...all the major economies are saturated with debt. Accordingly, central bank balance sheet expansion has lost its Keynesian magic entirely. Now the great sea of freshly minted liquidity simply fuels the carry trades as gamblers everywhere load up with any asset that generates a yield or short-run capital gain, and fund these bloated positions with cheap options and repo style finance.

But here’s the obvious thing. Central banks can’t normalize interest rates—-that is, allow the money markets to rise off the zero-bound—-without triggering a violent unwind of the carry trades on which today’s massive asset inflation is built. On the other hand, they can no longer stimulate GDP growth, either, because the credit expansion channel to the main street economy of households and business is blocked by the reality of peak debt.

So they end up like the pathetic Mario Draghi—-energetically pounding square pegs into round holes without a clue as to the financial conflagration lurking just around the corner. Yes, the era of Keynesian money printing is over and done. But don’t wait for the small lady at the Fed to sing, either." --David Stockman

Friday, September 26, 2014

An American president was launching bombs, dropping bombs on potentially innocent citizens. And where was the peace movement? Where were the peace protests? They were nowhere. I was told, "Well, that's because they're worn out from the weekend's activities protesting climate change." ... "According to the Washington Post, only 22 anti-war activists protested near the White House this week, and 'it was the latest display of how Obama has neutralized the left.' Left-wing activist David Swanson, 'who voted for Obama in 2008...' told the Post that 'if George W. Bush were launching wars with Congress out of town, oh, it would be flooded,'" and San Francisco'd be flooded.

If this were Bush doing this with Congress out of town and without a declaration of war and without a sign-off on from Congress, you would have seen the streets flooded. But we're not seeing the streets flooded...

Scandal: The attorney general who oversaw the administration's Fast and Furious gun-walking operation into Mexico resigns right after a federal court denies a DOJ request to delay releasing Fast And Furious documents.

Eric Holder's resignation as attorney general, like anything that occurs in the Obama administration, raises questions of timing.

Pundits ask why now, with some suggesting President Obama is getting a two-fer — ginning up his base with tributes to the first African-American AG before the midterms while starting the nomination and confirmation process before a possible Republican takeover of the Senate in November.

Rush Limbaugh has even suggested that Obama, who in an effort to hold the Senate has reminded Democratic voters that he still gets to appoint Supreme Court justices, might be making Holder available for such an appointment should a vacancy occur.

Both may be true, but Kelly Terry-Willis, the sister of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, thinks a recent court defeat for the Department of Justice may be the real reason.

Her brother was murdered on Dec. 14, 2010, with weapons "walked" into Mexico under Fast and Furious. ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata was also a Fast and Furious casualty.

When Melora Rivera heard an intruder kicking the front door of her Venice, California, home Wednesday morning, her reaction was to jump out of bed and onto her roof.

"Once I saw him in the house, I knew that we both couldn't be there," Rivera told CNN TV affiliate KCAL/KCBS. "I knew that I didn't want to have a confrontation with him of any sort, you know, not knowing what his intention was."

Rivera, dressed only in a flannel shirt, used her cell phone to call police as the intruder also climbed onto the roof... "The drop is, I would guess, more than 20 feet," Rivera said. "So there was no safely jumping off the roof or coming down from the roof at that point."

A more rational home defense system would involve one (or preferably all) of the following.

The Media Research Center held its annual awards gala -- the 2014 Dishonors Award for media bias -- and one particularly pungent pundit took home the grand prize.

A raucous crowd of conservatives attending the Media Research Center's 2014 Gala featuring the DisHonors Awards on Thursday evening selected none other than liberal columnist and shameless Obama/Clinton sycophant Eleanor Clift as the recipient of the Quote of the Year for her insistence that Amb. Chris Stevens was not murdered by terrorists because he died, reportedly, of smoke inhalation...

She beat out current and former MSNBCers Krystal Ball and Martin Bashir, respectively.

On Thursday, September 25, Eric Holder announced that he would step down as Attorney General of the United States. If you are a regular reader of the Weekly Update, you know that since the day he was appointed to office, Judicial Watch has battled day in and day out to prevent Holder from continuing to corrupt the Department of Justice (DOJ). And, in fact, in January of this year, we named him to the Judicial Watch list of the “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for the sixth year in a row. Many quickly credited Judicial Watch’s work with helping to force Holder out. Former DOJ attorney Sidney Powell was blunt in her New York Observercolumn about Holder’s disastrous tenure:

He has made the Department of Obstructing Justice notorious. Federal judges are stepping in to end his stone walling of Congressional and other investigations on several fronts, and now he’s on the run.

QOTD: "...the government argues that it must devote significant numbers of attorneys to this matter if it hopes to comply with the current Vaughn index deadline … But the Department has known about its Vaughn index obligations since July 18, 2014 … At best, it means the Department has been slow to react to this Court’s previous Order. At worst, it means the Department has ignored that Order until now.

...[S]eventy-five days—plus another twenty-one, based in part on Judicial Watch’s consent—is enough time for the government to prepare the index that this Court has ordered, given that this matter has been pending for over two years. The Court will therefore extend the Department’s Vaughn index submission deadline to October 22, 2014—and no further." --U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates

Thursday, September 25, 2014

National Defense: The president launches attacks on the Islamic State with two weapons systems that were targeted for elimination by the administration years before their usefulness ended or any replacements were ready.

With the decision to launch air and missile strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, in addition to ongoing strikes in Iraq in what is said to be the start of a long and sustained campaign to "degrade and destroy" the terrorist group, President Obama has stumbled upon a revelation:

The military whose budgets he's slashed and weapons systems he opposed is suddenly quite useful.

Obama’s approach to foreign policy is the stuff of fiction. He likes to say Al Qaeda has been destroyed and all that’s left are the metastasized rogue bands of terrorists acting independently of Al Qaeda Central. One band in particular is the Khorasan group.

It is comprised of the Osama bin Laden followers from the 1990’s. They are not an affiliate, or an offshoot, or a franchise. They ARE al Qaeda and they follow the leadership of al-Zawahiri, Osama’s successor.

They have been dangerous since 2009 and they have been unremittingly dangerous. They were responsible for the underwear bomber, the Christmas Day bomber and many other bombings.

They didn’t become dangerous yesterday, last month or even last year. They’ve been dangerous since Barack Obama became president and they have been dangerous the entire time Obama said al Qaeda was on the run.

It is no coincidence that Holder’s resignation comes on the heels of another court ruling that the Justice Department must finally cough up information about how Holder’s Justice Department lied to Congress and the American people about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, for which Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives. Over the past several months, Judicial Watch also exposed how Holder’s Justice Department was implicated in the IRS scandal and how Justice Department lawyers helped defend the illegal stonewall that kept secret key material related to Benghazi.

The disgraced Holder’s exit is past due accountability for Holder’s Fast and Furious lies, and I hope it brings some solace to the family of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the hundreds of innocent Mexicans likely killed thanks to the Holder Justice Department’s scheme that armed the murderous Mexican drug cartels.

QOTD: "Then came the 2014 Republican primary season and a scorched earth campaign by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Republican establishment, Rove’s Super-PACs and their Big Business allies which by-and-large achieved primary victory for the candidates they backed.

So Rove and his Big Business donors got what they wanted – candidates who either stood for policies, like amnesty, that grassroots conservatives oppose, or who avoided the issues and like Mitt Romney campaigned on their resumes.

What Rove doesn’t seem to understand is that those missing millions that he thinks Republican candidates need to win their 2014 Senate campaigns have already been given to candidates like Chris McDaniel, Joe Carr, Dr. Greg Brannon, Dr. Milton Wolf, Frank Roche and Dave Brat who stood for the positions that grassroots conservative donors favor.

These small donors oppose amnesty for illegal aliens, they favor a strong national defense against radical Islam and respect for the constitutional role of Congress in war-making, and they want an end to the culture of government lies created by Barack Obama and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.

They are not going to give to and support candidates who won’t stand for and campaign on those issues." --George Rasley